My friends were looking forward to playing the new Minecraft version and so I put myself to work.
Of course I did not go with average option of renting a game server from a privacy-invasive company, instead, I decided to self-host Crafty-controller in a Proxmox LXC, which allows me to spin up a Minecraft server in just about a click or so.
Then, I configured the firewalls (I revamped the whole firewall system for my proxmox instance), during which I learned a lot about how they work and I really enjoyed it.
Following that, I created my backup system. Here’s how it looks like:
- Crafty makes 2 backups a day: one at 0:00, and another one at 12:00
- A pair of cronjob tasks are then used to sync the save files to Proton Drive using rclone (at 1:00 and 13:00)
- Every sunday, Proxmox takes a snapshot of the Crafty LXC container (in the future, I plan to transfer these backups to a NAS).
This setup allows me to have a private and secure (well, as secure as port forwarding gets) Minecraft server up and running for me and my friends to play.
And as for the bonus, I run Proxmox on a good old Thinkcentre, which consumes very little electricity, effectively making this option one, if not the cheapest way to host a Minecraft server.
Gratitude
I wanted to keep this short but I have to express my gratitude towards the following:
- rclone, for being so versatile and easy to set up
- proton drive, for being the best encrypted cloud storage
- proxmox, for taking brilliant use of the virtualization linux offers
- crafty-controller, for the being an awesome way to host minecraft servers
- nano-gpt, for being the way to take advantage of AI in 2025; it helped me a lot with setting up firewalls
- duckdns, for being the easiest way to configure dynamic dns